'Paradise' Season 2 Review
- Connor Petrey
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
Season Two. [Episodes 1 - 3]
Aired On: Hulu on Disney+.
Release Date: 02/23/26.
Genre: Action. Drama. Thriller.
The Verdict: A Must-See
Season two of Paradise takes us outside of the bunker into a dystopian future that rivals the high emotions the first season brought out. The finale of season one took us on a wild ride from discovering who assassinated the President to Xavier setting off to find his wife on a personal aircraft and into the abyss of the unknown.
Episode one opens mysteriously with no recap and you soon learn it’s because it’s essentially a bottle episode. Introducing Annie, played by Shailene Woodley (The Descendants) into the story from Day One to three years into the aftermath of the “end of the world”. What I love about this show is that they didn’t just throw in a new character into our current story, they built her in and let us get to know who she was prior to everything going down, and managed to do it effectively. Annie is a tour guide at Graceland (Elvis’s famous homestead), who seeks shelter with a co-worker inside the estate when things turn for the worse. As time passes and unfortunate consequences of limited resources occur, her stay is interrupted by a raid of travelers.
This episode is a fundamental part of this new season, to allow us an idea of how those not close to the White House reacted on the day of disaster. Woodley is terrific as a naturally guarded individual who hasn’t known a stranger in three years.
Obviously in a dystopian future, the audience is similarly defensive of a new face coming into frame alongside someone we’ve gotten to know so rapidly with the fear of them being taken away in a snap. Throughout the premiere, we explore her reality of living in Graceland alongside the accompaniment of her new guests - including the leader of the group Link played by Thomas Doherty (Tell Me Lies).
Leading into the second episode, we get our first look at Xavier (Sterling K. Brown), as things have not gone as planned. Seeking shelter after injury, he briefly becomes a lone adult in the life of an assortment of young children. Even with these new distractions, his sole objective is to find his wife, Teri (Enuka Okuma) in Atlanta.
The show brilliantly backtracks from where the first episode ends for an exquisite backstory of just how Xavier came to be in his position. We see more of his love story with Teri, including their meet cute stitched in through present day madness.
Of course we have to work our way back to the bunker for numerous reasons, but the involvement of these new characters and the surrounding mystery of where exactly Teri is makes the outside tale all the more striking.
The third episode takes yet another leap and abandons this storyline for the focus being on the rebellion of those who still reside in Paradise. These scenarios are much more politically biased than the episodes that came before and to the right viewer might reflect our modern climate. Even being so, they’re intense and thrilling in a way similar to that of the first season.
We’re just three episodes in and being outside allows the elements to take full control of our anxiety for our leading characters. People can be ruthless, more so than we’ve even seen before in the bunker, and there’s no telling how successful a rescue mission will be with so many obstacles.
With a phenomenal score and music accompaniments that help lure in our expected emotions, from my perspective, I can’t help but be as engrossed as ever in this not-so-far from reality SciFi series.
If season one of Paradise locked you in, this season will do just the same, but on a grander, deeper scale. Now that the secret is out of the bag and the mission at hand is clear, it’s just a matter of forward momentum that’s keeping Xavier from the reunion he longs for.
If anything is sure, Dan Fogelman’s political thriller is off to an outstanding restart with so much on the horizon to explore and equally become emotionally distraught over. It’s as if the often forgotten concepts of Under the Dome and Revolution became one to make Paradise what it is today.
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